Sunday, February 27, 2005

One is apt to be labeled a conspiracy theorist for merely suggesting that there is a ruling class.

Contemporary America is of two minds toward conspiranoia. On one hand, it has become the default popular view, one of commodified skepticism towards history and government. This sentiment has proliferated rapidly since the 1960s and Watergate. With the collapse of the reassuring dualities of the Cold War over the course of the 1990s, it has culminated in a pervasive apocalyptic teleology.

On the other hand, the disavowal of conspiranoia has also become an integral part of the conventional wisdom itself, a social technology of control that establishes the boundaries of "responsible discourse” by reflecting elite consensus on the fundamental nature of social reality, in accordance with the elite's own class interests. This makes for an incredibly effective means of establishing ruling class hegemony by controlling dissent, foreclosing alternatives, engineering support, and transmuting the interests of the ruling class into that of the nation as a whole.

One is apt to be labeled a conspiracy theorist for merely suggesting that there is a ruling class that seeks to maintain hegemony, to say nothing of the idea that the ruling class occasionally uses conspiratorial methods. Rather than conspiracy theory, most media and intellectual gatekeepers prefer to view elite behavior through the lens of "somnambulist theory," "coincidence theory," "incompetence theory," or "spontaneity theory."